4 Referral Worthy Real Estate Marketing Ideas
Have you set up your real estate business, like a retail shop, hoping and waiting for the next customer to come in? Hoping you get a chance to sell something, anything? Have you been told that you must have a website only to receive no web traffic? “If you build it they will come,” the web developer told you.
If you want your marketing to work, you have to be proactive. Let’s look at some ideas that you can implement today.
Identify Your Niche
Knowing your customer is essential to your business growth. Defining your niche can help you identify customers that have a problem or a need that you can solve.
For example, there are more and more Canadian buyers in the Valley. (Canada Arizona Business Council)The low housing prices*1, favorable exchange rate*2, and mild winters have made Arizona a prime location for Canadian investors. With this type of information, you are able to create very strategic marketing efforts and create programs and materials to attract these investors.
Identifying a niche is a way to help focus your marketing efforts and create something that adds value to your future prospects. It is easier to create a solution for a small audience than for a large scattered audience. As an agent, you can’t answer everyone’s questions, just like your parents can’t make pizza for your brother, hamburgers for your sister, and tacos for you. There is not enough time. Once you become the expert in your niche, you can create a new niche and solve their problems as well to help expand your business. There’s a saying in real estate – it’s “be the source of the source”.
Email Marketing
Email Marketing is often seen as something that takes too much time; creating newsletters, finding topic to promote, or researching homes for sale. However, the return on email marketing can be huge. In fact, the return on investment for email marketing can be up to $40 per dollar spent. (MarketingProfs) Yes, for every dollar you put into email marketing you can receive up to $40 in return. How can you use email marketing to get the biggest return on your marketing dollars with minimal effort? Email Auto Responders.
Email Auto Responders
Imagine that your new niche prospects, an investor from Canada, visits your website. On your site, you have a form that gathers their contact information. Once this form is complete, your marketing software sends out an automatic email welcoming them to the Valley and offering help on their home search. In two days, your marketing software sends another email with updated properties meeting their criteria. Three days later, your marketing software sends an eBook (a free gift that you have created to help answer their questions) “Arizona Living: Reasons to Love Arizona”. During this time frame you are building a relationship with your prospective client. You have established yourself as the expert in the local market and most importantly you have impressed your new prospect. Now when you pick up the phone to call, the Canadian Investor has an understanding of who you are and how you can help in their home search.
Email marketing does not have to take a ton of time. The trick is to set something up that is automated. Make sure to do it right the first time and benefit from your hard work down the road.
Blogging
Once you have identified your niche market, a blog is the best place to show your prospects you are the industry expert; you become the source of information. You can create custom content that helps your niche market and educate your clients to ensure they have the latest trends, market conditions, and current information. Blogging is a great way to gain credibility in a complex industry.
Blogging can also help send more potential leads to your website. Statistics show that blogs can increase web traffic by up to 55%*3. More traffic does two things for your business. One, as you blog about your niche market, you increase the chance that your niche customer finding you. Two, with email marketing set up, you can potentially reach more customers. You have a website to attract visitors, use your blog to help drive more traffic and capture leads.
Blogging is essential to increase web traffic. It is not enough to just have a static website anymore, in order to drive traffic you have to add content regularly. Create content that is designed for your niche market and watch your web traffic increase. It is also a way to stand out from the competition as only 12% of Real Estate Agents have a blog (2014 National Association of REALTORS® Member Profile).
Social Media
Let’s face it social media is has become a part of everyday life, and must become part of your real estate life as well. Real estate agents are normally outgoing, fun loving people and your personality can show on social media. 61% of real estate agents and 73% of all adults are using Facebook or Twitter. One piece of advice, use social media to engage with prospects, not just promote your listings, open houses, or you own agenda. People want to connect and have conversations on social media, not receive marketing messages. Social media is not a traditional marketing channel, it is something better.
Remember, you cannot open your real estate practice up and hope new clients knock the door down. As an agent, you have to be proactive and market yourself. Knowing your niche market will help you focus in on your marketing efforts and help create content that will attract new customers. Email and Social Media will help distribute your message and build a relationship. So, get out there and market your services the right way, the smart way.
*1 – http://www.bankrate.com/finance/real-estate/home-values.aspx
*2 – http://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/exchange/?page_moved=1
Tags: marketing